


Beyond the A&P

by DWEmma



Category: Are You There God It's Me Margaret?
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 14:43:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11853729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DWEmma/pseuds/DWEmma
Summary: Margaret, now 21, living with Sylvia and going to Barnard, has a chance meeting with Laura Danker on a subway platform where she again gets schooled about listening to rumors.





	Beyond the A&P

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertVixen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertVixen/gifts).



I looked at the small golden clock sitting next to her bed in my grandmother Sylvia Simon’s spare room, the room I now call home, and quietly swore to myself. Well, if you would count goshdamnit as a swear, which I hoped God wouldn’t. I finished buttoning the faux pearl buttons on my red plaid blouse, and at the last minute grabbed my very stylish lace ruff to feminize the outfit. Denim skirts and plaid shirts seemed so informal, but it’s what all the other girls at Barnard were wearing, and frankly I still haven’t figured out how to wear what pleases me if what pleases me makes me stick out. I hoped that the ruff would be thought to be whimsical, rather than old fashioned. Girls were always calling me hopelessly old fashioned, and I didn’t really understand why. 

I grabbed my briefcase, and I called out to my grandmother on my way out, “Grandmother, I’m off! I’ll be back at 7.” 

“Stay out longer,” she said, “Better yet, meet a nice Jewish young man and don’t come home at all! And now that you’re an adult woman and my roommate, call me Sylvia.” 

“I’ll be home at 7, grandma. There aren’t any boys at my college. And I’m interested in college, not in boys.” 

My grandmother had become less formal with age, which happens to be 70, while I was struggling to keep up with the way of things. I rang for the elevator, pulled the door open, pulled the grate open and then closed, and pushed the button for the ground floor. 

I left the building and walked toward the 1 train at 72 street so I could take it up to the 116 street station. A lot of the girls at the college lived in the housing near the college, but my parents felt more safe having me stay with my grandmother than the “out of control youth of today.” Which is ironic, since didn’t they move us to New Jersey 10 years ago to get me out of Sylvia’s influence? And I doubt that the dorm mothers would be encouraging me to stay out all night with boys, Jewish other otherwise. But I enjoyed having a room all to myself, and since we were on a direct subway line to the college, I didn’t much mind the commute. 

I fished a token out of my pocketbook as I walked down the dark stairs. It was moments like this when I questioned why I didn’t just go to Wellesley or Smith like my mother had wanted, and been in an idillic rural setting. But I was a New Yorker, goshdamnit, and I needed to earn that title back after my junior high and high school years in the suburbs. I wasn’t afraid of anything. 

I waited for the train I needed, since this was one of those days when all the trains going by were 2s and 3s, and only the 1 train went as far north as Barnard and Columbia. As I watched people get on and off the train, I counted hats. 

I was up to unlucky 13 (4 ball caps, 4 ladies hats, and 5 men’s proper hats) when I caught sight of a woman in a very sophisticated teal colored jumpsuit getting off a 2 train. She had a wide red belt over it, her ample bosoms filling out the top of the jumpsuit. I felt the same need to look down at my 32 As, barely parting tugging at the pearl buttons of my blouse. I stared at her, not knowing whether what I was seeing was real. It couldn’t be her, though. She was wearing makeup, and her blond hair was teased up a bit, and she did not look the least bit shy. She was as tall as ever, and her figure reminded me of the Barbie dolls I played with as a child. Like a smooth hour glass that could be traced up and down, perfectly balanced. She also didn’t look the least bit Catholic, though I still never exactly figured out how a Catholic looks or behaves. 

It was now, or never, though. If it wasn’t her, I was just another crazy New Yorker talking to her. but if it was her...

“Laura?” I asked. “Laura Danker?” 

The woman stopped her her tracks and raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow at me. “Do I know you?” 

“Aren’t...aren’t you Laura Danker of Farbrook, New Jersey? I’m Margaret. Margaret Simon. Of, well, Farbrook New Jersey. We were in Mr. Benedict’s class at Delano School together. I think. Are you she?” 

“Oh, you,” she said, letting her face down in a way where I recognized her, almost like I had knocked the sophistication out of her with the blow of my words. It was Laura Denker, allright. But now I had no idea what I planned to say to her. 

You see, I last saw Laura at the end of the 8th grade. She never came back to the final year of Junior High. She didn’t go on with us to High School. Nancy had said that she got pregnant and had to drop out of school, and was sent to one of those Catholic Homes to Wayward Girls. She and her family moved to California after the 10th grade. I have to admit, Janie and Gretchen and I were actually a little relieved when she moved. It turned out that she was saying just awful things about each of us to the others, and making us promise not to tell each other. I didn’t know how to get away from her when she lived down the street, since I didn’t want her saying cruel things about me to everyone, but her leaving was just what I needed to get out of that. 

I hadn’t heard from her in a few years until she sent me a copy of Playboy magazine where she swore that the centerfold was Laura under a pseudonym right before high school graduation. I didn’t think it looked like her, though her bosoms were very impressive. Now, looking at Laura, I was pretty sure it wasn’t her. Well nearly. 

“Well Margaret, now that you’ve identified me, can I go on my way, or do you have some nonsense that your little friends came up with that you want to accuse me of?” 

My face blushed, realizing that I had been thinking about the Playboy model in the same way I used to think about Laura with Moose and Evan behind the A&P. Now that I knew that never happened, I was a terrible girl to even be thinking about it, since the model wasn’t her. Though the model’s figure certainly did look like hers. 

“No,” I said, shaking my head, and looking pointedly at her. 

“Oh?” she said. “You don’t want to ask me about my pregnancy, about my pornography career, about my three consecutive marriages to much older men? Because believe me, my parents have heard everything people say. I don’t know why they just don’t move away from that horrible place, but there they are.” 

“Well where did you go?” I asked, trying not to let her know that I had heard two of those rumors, and partially believed in one. 

“My parents sent me to a Catholic Girl’s Boarding School in Connecticut. 9th through 12th grade. Then I came to the city for secretarial school. Then...well, I got a job. And here I am.” 

“Oh,” I said. “I never believed that you were the girl in Playboy.” 

She let out a short bark of a laugh. “Playboy? I hadn’t heard that one.”

“Oh,” I started, “I thought you said...”

“My parents were sent a clipping from a advertisement for an x-rated movie playing in the Village. Some creepy father or someone had seen it, decided it was me, and anonymously dropped off information about it at my parents’ home. They knew that I was safely within a nun’s reach at all times, so they knew it wasn’t me.”

“Oh,” I said. 

“I don’t know why I’m telling you any of these things, Margaret. You and your terrible friends were the ones who spread the rumor about my making it with Mr. Benedict behind the bleachers at the 8th grade dance.”

“That was Nancy, not me. I never believed anything she said after I found out that you didn’t go behind the A&P...”

“Yeah, Margaret, but you never stopped the rumors, either, did you? You didn’t spread them around, but you let it happen. My parents believed that one. Mr. Benedict almost got fired. He did get arrested and questioned. Did you even know that?” 

“I...didn’t,” I stumbled back a little. I stared at her ruby red lips, at her loose fitting jumpsuit that perfectly showed off her curves. My hand began to touch the lace ruff at my collar nervously. I wished I had never called out to her. 

“Well let’s clear some things up, then. I never chose to need a bra in the 4th grade. That was not my fault. I didn’t chose to be taller than all the rest of the girls. I never went behind the A&P with anyone, I never made it with a teacher, I never got pregnant, I’ve never been involved in pornography, and I’ve never been married. I am, in fact, still a virgin, not that that’s any of your business, still a Catholic of sorts, despite how those nuns at boarding school tried to suck the joy out of religion for me, and a proud graduate of secretarial school, and the private secretary to an architect who works in this very neighborhood. And no, I’m not making it with him, either. He’s gay. These,” and here she stopped talking to point at her bosoms, which caused me to stare at them and blush again, in that way that staring at a woman’s body always made me feel so funny inside, so warm and nervous. “These do not define who I am. They’re beautiful, they make me look fantastic in clothes, and girls like you have never been able to take their eyes off them, but they don’t make me a slut. And you can tell your little friend Nancy that.” 

I stared at her with my mouth open. The last time someone chewed me out that badly was, well, the last time Laura Danker had called me a filthy liar and a little pig. And what did she mean by “girls like me?” I guess she meant flat chested. Well that wasn’t my fault, either. 

Laura sighed. “I don’t even know why I stopped. People call me Lulu now. Laura is a person I wish I had never suffered to be. But this felt good. It’s burdened me for too long. It’s your turn to carry it. Because you know what, Margaret? I never did anything to deserve any of it. It was all you and your horrible little friend.”

“We’re not,” I mumbled.

“You’re not what?” she asked, exasperated with me. 

“Friends. Nancy moved to California. Janie and Gretchen and I barely even talk now. I’m at Barnard,” I say, with a certain amount of pride. 

She rolls her eyes at this. “Of course you are. Well I...I need to get to work. Some of us work for a living. It’s been...well what would the opposite of a blast from the past be, do you think? A real implosion from the past? I don’t think exchanging information would be appropriate at this point.” 

I couldn’t just let her go like that. “I’m sorry, Lulu,” I say, trying out her new name. 

“No,” she said. “You call me Laura. And I don’t accept anything from you.” And she walked away, her hips swaying back and forth as her red pumps navigated across the cracked subway floor. I watched her push through the turnstile and sprint up the stairs like a true New Yorker. 

That’s when I felt the whoosh of hot subway air pushed all around me, ruffling my hair as the 1 train north finally pulled into the station. I got on the almost full train, held onto the pole, and kept my footing as the train pulled out of the station. 

I haven’t felt like this since I confronted Moose that spring day, and found out that everything Nancy Wheeler had said about Laura was a lie. Everything had been a lie. I guess there never is a good enough way to apologize to some people. 


End file.
